I have been with Dreamhost for a few years, and it is becoming increasingly irritating that I am unable to send email to many domains. The list of domains that block my email for “spamming” grows, even though I send out a total of maybe 5 emails a week. TOTAL! Dreamhost tells me that it is because people on my same email server are spamming and ISP’s such as Verizon are super-hyper in blocking things, and I suffer for it. For two years they have been working for a solution. For two years I have been getting email bounced back to me from AOL, Verizon, and a few other domains.

My question is, do all hosting providers have this same problem? I would like some feedback. If I can find a place where I can actually send email, I will switch companies, but if this is a universal problem I will just swallow my tongue and live with it.

I think it’s fairly common these days… It was one of the reasons I moved form my last host to Dreamhost. I can’t tell you that things are 100% now becuase they are not, but they are a LOT better than my previous company!

As I said! It could be a lot worse, and IS elsewhere! If you are mailing to friends/work mates/family then all they need to do is add you to a “safe” list, but from your previous comments about sending 5mb+ of email per day, I’m guessing it’s corporate/mass mail you are sending so you’re kinda stuck with it!

There is something in the control panel about trusted mail I think its called SPF or something like that… maybe worth a look… Let me know how you get on as I’ve not tried this myself!

Yup. Spammers ruin it for everyone, and the large ISPs have to be hypersensitive to maintain their public image of being “family safe” or whatever (although that’s B.S., to be frank).

As long as people buy stuff or sign-up for stuff from spam, it will never go away. Since email effectively costs nothing, spammers can send out millions of emails. It only takes a handful of suckers to make their racket worthwhile.

It is for that reason that I think there should be a system employed where it costs a tiny amount of money to send email (1 cent perhaps). The fee is then waived if the email is “accepted” by the recipient. If the email is marked as “not accepted”, the sender must pay. Any fees collected are shared by the intended recipient and the organizations that manage the system (to pay for its administration). Spammers would end up paying a fortune, and spam would probably become less viable.

SPF won’t help with the problem of DH mail servers getting blocked by big ISPs. A lot of spammers register SPF records, so a successful SPF check isn’t a good indicator of legitimate mail. (A failed SPF check, however, is a good indicator of spam.)

NO! Not all hosting companies have this problem. I bumped into it on my last host (churchquest.com), and they were able to figure out which of their servers were being blocked and move us to a different one. I never had the problem again after that point.

I’ve been emailing back & forth with DreamHost support about this for the last 2 months. So far, I’ve been told repeatedly that “we -are- working on it,” but no mention has been made of what work is being done, other than waiting for AOL to remove us from their blacklist.